I’m a believer, personally, in staying the hell home when I’m sick instead of going in to work.

I meet a lot of other people who feel the same way, and I see lots of articles saying that bosses would rather you stay home.

In practice, however, I have only ever been told to go home when I’m sick once, and it turned out I had pneumonia. Usually, when I HAVE gone in to work when I was visibly sick, I’ve been praised for it, and when I’ve taken more than, say, a single day off sick, I tend to catch flack for it.

So reality differs from ideal. Big surprise, right?

Anyway, I was tremendously sick for over a week recently. I even missed a day of school, and it marked the first time in three years that I have missed a class for any reason. I was honestly, earnestly, sick, worse off than I have been in a very long time, to the point where I couldn’t stand or sit upright for more than a few minutes without wanting to throw up.

On the other hand, I had a project due last Friday, and guess what, was the only guy available to finish it up.

So, I took Monday off, went in to work and coughed my way through Tuesday and Wednesday, couldn’t make it in on Thursday, and then made it in on Friday to finish the project, after which I missed the aforementioned class on Saturday.

I got considerable praise for coming in and getting the project out, by the way.

Then, on Monday, two people I work reasonably closely with – one of our vice presidents and our chief architect – were out.

I’m reasonably sure that I am responsible for the godawful weekend both had and their subsequent absences.

They’re both really NICE people, so I feel bad for this on a personal level.

On a smug bastard level, I’m calculating the difference between their salary and mine and how many important decisions they make on a daily basis and – any way I look at it – the three days of working-while-sick the company got out of me last week were pretty much dwarfed by the overall productivity hit of these two power players being down.

There’s a point in there somewhere but I’m not coming to it cleanly, so I’ll leave it unsettled and move on.

We have – and this is back to work, but not at all related to my status as a Typhoid Mary – we have an all-company lunch on Friday.

Friday is a payday, mind you, and the week before last was marked by a full week of executive meetings behind closed doors with our corporate consultant.

I’m not saying that anything’s going to happen at this lunch. It might be a jovial all-hands-let’s-talk-about-corporate direction meeting. It’s not that I’m writing down a list of the top five people most likely to be let go and putting it in an envelope that I will bring to the meeting or anything. Cause that would be, you know, pessimistic. 🙂

(And, yes, I’m on the list; my boss knows that I’m leaving in June so if they are looking at doing staff reductions they’d be idiots to keep me.)